3rd Informal ACM SIGPLAN Workshop on Mechanizing Metatheory

Victoria, British Columbia, Canada

Important Dates

Submission deadline: 3 July 2008

Author Notification: 1 August
2008

Workshop: 20 September 2008

Workshop Description

Researchers in programming languages have long felt the need for
tools to help formalize and check their work. With advances in
language technology demanding deep understanding of ever larger and
more complex languages, this need has become urgent. There are a
number of automated proof assistants being developed within the
theorem proving community that seem ready or nearly ready to be
applied in this domain—yet, despite numerous individual efforts in
this direction, the use of proof assistants in programming language
research is still not commonplace: the available tools are confusingly
diverse, difficult to learn, inadequately documented, and lacking in
specific library facilities required for work in programming
languages.

The goal of this workshop is to bring together researchers who have
experience using automated proof assistants for programming language
metatheory, and those who are interested in using tool support for
formalizing their work. One starting point for discussion will be the
obstacles that hinder mechanisation (whether they be pragmatic or
technical), and what users and developers can do to overcome them.

Format

The workshop will consist of presentations by the participants,
selected from submitted abstracts. It will focus on providing a
fruitful environment for interaction and presentation of ongoing
work. Participants are invited to submit working notes, source files,
and abstracts for distribution to the attendees, but as the workshop
has no formal proceedings, contributions may still be submitted for
publication elsewhere. (See the
SIGPLAN republication policy for more details.)

Proposals for new challenge problems that benchmark programming
language work.

Submission Guidelines

Email submissions to crary
AT cs.cmu.edu.
Submissions
should be no longer than one page and in PDF and printable on US
Letter or A4 sized paper. Persons for whom this poses a hardship should
contact the program chair.